


Let No Man Write My Epitaph

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: 11th Century CE RPF, DUNNETT Dorothy - Works, King Hereafter - Dorothy Dunnett, Orkneyinga Saga
Genre: Author's Favorite, F/M, Gen, Orkney, The Domestic Life of Vikings, Yuletide 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:55:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21757153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: Shipwrecked on Orkney, Groa of Moray and her hushand Earl Thorfinn come to an uneasy understanding.
Relationships: Groa (King Hereafter)/Thorfinn Sigurdsson
Comments: 21
Kudos: 28
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AuKestrel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuKestrel/gifts).



It was a winter of sudden calms and bitter gales, so that the harbours froze with crackling pan-ice, and then two days later the cliffs and stacks stood shield-wall against the thundering wrath of deep sea swells. No one sailed from Iceland in winter, that year, and the ships from Nidaros took weeks to find harbour in Moray or Caithness. On Orkney, they roped down the fishing boats, and weighted the thatch with heather netting and stones the size of geese in summer. Thorkel Amundason, who answered also, resentfully, to Thorkel Fóstri, planned to bare his teeth at the eastern seas and keep Yule at Skaill. Then black-headed Earl Thorfinn, the silent, the skull-splitter, the most exasperating foster-son in all the known lands, had raced his longships back from Dublin on the tail-end of a south-westerly gale so strong it had blown two spindly goats and half the chickens right out of the sheds, but brought the longships safe to the Mainland. So, it was Orphir again, with its squat stone halls and sheltered bays. They heaved the lean Irish pigs overboard from the longships and made them swim for it, which at least made for an entertaining afternoon, and then Dubh Mhair had stood on the beach with her long grey plaits blown sideways and a wooden paddle in each hand, saying, did they expect her to make dumplings from three dozen trotters and a pailful of tails?

Half the winter stores, the malt for the Yule ale; the rye and oats and walnuts; the smoked fish; the spiced hams; the boxes of preserved fruit; these were barrel-tight and buried on the Ness, hidden away against winter and raiding earls. They took Thorfinn's dragon-prowed longship _Grágás_ across the inner sea at first light the next morning, heeled over on the cusp of the tide on a western wind, timed so that the ebb in Hoy sound was little more a dark hint of the turbulent rost it would become. If tide and wind held true, a ship could coast through the sound into the inner sea in less time than it took Arnór to tune his harp. In rougher weather, there was flat water on the lee side, if a ship found way to skirt the rocks at the eastern entrance. But a westerly wind and an eastern ebb set the sea churning as fiercely as a Lofoten maelstrom, and no Orkney sailor would set his prow against the force of it.

On Ness, waiting for the tide to turn, they dug up the barrels and strapped them under the rowing benches, lit a fire, and sacrificed a yearling goat to their empty stomachs, although no one was fool enough to broach the dried figs.

It was the sharp-eyed Icelander Aðvinr who saw the ship first, and called them up onto the crest of the Ness. There was a ship in the sound, where no ship should have been, a shallow, broad-bottomed scow built for the coastal trade. It had no business in Orkney, in winter, and especially not caught by wind and tide, trapped between the towering red cliffs of Hoy and the dragon-toothed skerries of the northern shoreline, where every rock was poised to rip open a boat's hull. The crew had at least lowered the sail before the wind could drive it onto the Ness, but that left the boat without way, hull-up on every cross-weaved wave, plunging from surf to trough and up again. Three pairs of oars were managed hardily enough, but with the ship rolling like a barrel in surf half the time the oarsmen were pulling air, not sea, and only a miracle or the kindness of the Fates would bring them safe to shore.

Thorkel, who was no stranger to the death of ships, sucked in a breath and let it whistle out through his teeth. "One of yours?" he asked his foster-son.

"No," said Thorfinn.

"Ragnvald's?"

"No," said Thorfinn.

Thorkel's foster-son Thorfinn had spent the summer raiding with his nephew, golden-haired, sweet-tongued Earl Ragnvald, who had three years before received two-thirds of the Orkneys from the King in Norway and dispossessed his uncle in the process. His uncle, black-headed and expressionless, had kept the better third to stand with his own lands of Caithness, and demanded an alliance that had, unexpectedly, held. They were not friends, Ragnvald and Thorfinn, but together they gleamed like a two-headed axe, akin, edged, and dangerous.

"Look closer," said Thorfinn.

"Here on Orkney, we like our ships sea-worthy," said Thorkel.

On the cross-weaved seas of Orkney, the stray merchant ship tossed and rolled, only the strength of the oarsmen keeping it prow to the waves and unbreached.

"Our sailors, too," said Thorkel. He was well aware that behind him, in the familiar silent accord of men who had fought and drunk and slept together on the same rowing benches for years, Thorfinn's crew were filing down to the longship. _Grágás_ was a king's gift, powerfully built. Strong enough, perhaps, to brave the sound and rescue the struggling crew, if not the foundering ship.

His foster-son Thorfinn appeared not to have noticed, impassive as a whet-stone, the great beak of his nose parting the winds and his eyes fixed under the heavy, rain-wet gorse-bushes of his eyebrows. Thorkel had known Thorfinn's mother, and she had been a fair woman. His father had been of ordinary size. Thorfinn had hands the size of oar-blades and feet like a dolphin's flippers: he was angular as a crane-fly, taller than a church doorway, and wily as a sea-otter. He was not, Thorkel knew, an unfeeling man. There was a reason why Thorkel did the burning work.

It went against the grain, though, to watch a man drown. Thorkel, pointedly, coughed.

In the sound, the merchant ship wallowed, rolled, and clung to the face of a rising wave, heavy-bellied and water-logged. The faint cry of a sailor reached over the sound.

"Well," said Thorfinn. "Should I rescue my brother, do you think?"

Not a limb of him suggested imminent motion. Only his black hair, unkempt after an autumn's raiding, gusted in the contrary winds.

"What, Duncan?" Thorkel stared, but could distinguish neither bated raven flag nor well-groomed whisker. "King Duncan?"

"He had the same boat at Perth, when he was crowned," Thorfinn said. "Although it had an awning and a shoal of cushions, at the time."

"Cushions?"

"Embroidered," said Thorfinn.

Turning, he strode, unhurried, over the rough grass towards the bay, where the longship lay on the sand. Thorfinn had left most other men behind at fourteen in terms of leg-length, and Thorkel was no exception. He lengthened his stride, irritated.

"By the hands of virgins," added Thorfinn. He was not whistling, but had the air of a man who might, innocent as a cherub, if he showed any expression at all. A hard man to read, Thorkel's foster-son.

"You took a left turn with the stitching," said Thorkel, with the air of a man who did not believe a word.

"You didn't meet his wife," said Thorfinn. He removed his eyes from his longship's mast-head, where the sail was so neatly reefed a single knife-stroke would free it, and encompassed the polished rowlocks and resting oars. No more than a tenth of an hour had passed, but the crew had reefed the blood-red sail, secured the ship, and stood ready for the sea. Thorfinn had not said a word, but the longship's crew were, in this weather, after a year's hard sailing, as close as his own limbs. Young men, battle-hard, and because they were Thorfinn's men, his hird, they were as likely to throw out a treatise or two on the advantages of a literate yeoman as an obscene kenning.

Thorkel missed the days when all a man needed was a strong sword-arm and a well-turned mail-shirt. He was twenty years older than his foster-son.

Who paused, one hand on the shoulder of _Grágás_ ' gilded prow-dragon, looking at Thorkel, who was a farmer now, most of the time.

"Think that again, and I will remind you that steel does not age," said Thorkel. He had found it best, over the years, to be honest when dealing with the black-haired brat.

Thorfinn nodded, and raised his voice. Half the crew were on shore, waiting to push off, half on the ship, crowding the gunwales. "We'll take the lee side," said Thorfinn. "Keep to your oars and we'll force her through the ebb. Make enough sea, and Thorkel and I will bring her about and drop sail. We'll ride the ebb to the scow. Aegir, be ready, you'll take the reef-ropes. Eric, Ealdur, you and I have the grappling hooks. We'll try and bring them with us out of the sound."

It was a mad plan, and dangerous, and Thorfinn's crew grinned and shouted. "Heugh!" they cried, heaving the ship back out into the bay, splashing themselves over her shallow sides. "Heugh - ha! Heugh-ha!" at the oars, turning the longship's prow to the stirring sea. Then they were silent, ears bent to the call of the helmsman, bodies moving together at the oars. Once out the bay, they held as near to the shore as they could, in the lee of it, so that it was only the tide-ebb they fought in silent and painful battle. Every stroke of the oars demanded more, just to inch the boat forwards, and the rocks on the shore passed so slowly a priest could have walked faster than they were sailing. Yet they were moving, slowly gaining ground against the tide. In the prow, Thorfinn had not taken his eyes from the struggling merchant. Slowly, they fought they way past her, so that every man could see the ragged shreds of her sail and the tiring strokes of the oarsmen, caught between the full force of wind and tide. Now, the merchant ship did not ride the waves, but wallowed in them, the wind stirring the sea over the toothed rocks while the tide drew closer yet to the cliffs of Hoy.

Thorfinn raised his clenched fist. "About!" shouted helmsman. The oarsman, exact as a tumblers of a lock, reversed stroke on one side and heaved on the other: Aegir, a Hirta man, leapt for the mast. He had mastered it in an instant, knife flashed, slicing through the ropes that held the sail in place, so that the sail dropped just as _Grágás_ made the turn into the tide. She hit the rost broadside, just as wind snapped into the collapsing belly of her sail, and the momentum was enough to bring her up onto the surface of the water, fast enough to carry her through the white-topped cross-waves, fierce enough to whip the spray into their eyes and set every timber alive with the deep, thrumming tension of a ship at full stretch. They were bearing down on the merchant ship fast enough for Thorkel to fear for an instance that they would roll her under the longship's prow, but Thorfinn was already standing on the gunwale, one hand on the thwarts and the other ready with a grappling hook. Further down the rowing benches, Ealdur took his own stance, broad and sure-footed as a bear, and at the stern Eric was poised as a spear-thrower.

Before them, the merchant ship was close to dead in the water, so low waves were breaking over her stern: if they tied the two ships together for too long, the merchant could drag _Grágás_ down with her. Thorkel could see, now, the straining oarsmen, three of them bare-chested despite the spray and stinging wind, and the two figures huddled in the bow, clinging to the gunwale. The nearside oars would snap like kindling under _Grágás_ ' prow: the men at them, who had fought so hard to save the ship, would be flung into the sea.

"Ship the oars!" Thorkel shouted. "Ship the oars! Jump!"

Thorfinn's deep voice was pitched to carry across the waves. "Ready yourselves! Jump!"

The lead oarsman turned, shipping his oar, clumsy with weariness and cold. As he stumbled and fell, the wind caught his cloak, and unreeled it over the waves, and with it, the ox-blood banner of his bright red hair.

Her hair.

 _Grágás_ shouldered down the merchant ship's stern, Ealdur, howling, ran up the gunwale and cast his grappling hook, and Thorfinn leapt spread-limbed from the prow, fierce as a sea-eagle. The merchant was already rolling; there were men beside Thorkel, reaching out eager hands, pulling the oarsmen in, holding a second grappling line steady and a knife to the threads of it. Scuttling and wind-torn, the two passengers clawed their way over the rowing benches, and were hauled aboard. The merchant ship, helpless, was a dying ship, waves washing from gunwale to gunwale as if it was already driftwood. Thorfinn, black against the storm, was busy at the weigh-boards: his own knife flashed - and then he was upright, his wife Groa in his arms. He took one great stride, and another, so that it looked as if he floated over the drowning ship as it rolled, and then at last Thorkel could reach out and pull his foster-son aboard, and his foster-son's wife, sodden and parchment-pale, her eyes bruise-dark in her set face. But, both of them, alive.

Thorfinn's eyes met his. He had, Thorkel's foster-son, the battle-worn eyes of a man who had walked through fear and come through on the other side. Thorkel reached out to him, as he had once to the boy who had grown into the man, and, abruptly, found himself holding his foster-son's wife. She was delicate in his hands, strong in the way a young foal was strong, and shivering. He drew his own cloak over her and bent to shield her against the wind. They were kin: she was his cousin's child. Ingibjorg, Bergljot's daughter, an Arnmødling of Nidaros with all the armour and weight of her name. In Scotland, she was the Countess of Moray in her own right, and of Orkney, through Thorfinn. Thorkel had known her as a small child, met her again as the rebellious, pregnant teenager of her first marriage, and knew her now as Thorfinn's absent and powerful countess Groa, who had made her fiefdom among the crofters and fisher folk of Moray.

When he looked up, Ealdur and Aegir must have cut the grappling ropes, for the merchant ship was belly-up, beating off the longship's side with every wave, so she seemed to follow them even as they fled. The wind shoved them prow-down into the tide: the tide caught them by the stern and pushed them into the wind. If they caught the wrong gust they would be flung towards the cliffs of Hoy: steer into the wrong current, and the waiting white-water skerries would rip them apart. But Thorkel's foster-son was an Orkney man, and a sailor, which was more than could be said for his royal brother Duncan.

"Let this be a lesson to you never to sail with lesser kings," said Thorkel.

"He swore we would not leave the coastline," Groa said.

Her teeth were starting to chatter. On the other side of the mast, over the keening hum of the ropes and the hum of the straining sail, and the slap and hiss of the waves, Thorkel could hear someone retching. The longship settled, poised, driven. Thorfinn had found the outer edge of the tide and was riding it home.

"He was lying," said Thorkel. "He must have heard that Thorfinn serves the good Rhenish wine at Yule. You're sitting on a barrel of it."

His foster son's wife, who was a woman of fierce pragmatism and surprising strength at the oar, laughed.


	2. Chapter 2

She had blistered her palms to raw flesh, and the pads of every finger, and the sore at the base of her thumbs was crusted with lymph. He would not have known, but that when he laid her on his own bed and loosened her hands from his tunic, she had flinched from the pain. She had not cried out, his wife, even when he had called for clean clothes and warm water and rags and, kneeling, bathed every sore.

"I shall kill Duncan for this," he said, low enough not to be heard outside the close, shuttered warmth of his bedchamber.

"You cannot," said his wife, who had stood at his side at Perth when Duncan was crowned King of Alba, and had, remarkably, withstood Thorfinn's forbearance and his ambition. "You cannot yet hold Cumbria, and Northumbria will rise against you. You must build something better first."

She had struck him to the heart at Thurso, where Thorkel Fóstri had burnt the great hall and with it her first husband Gillacomghain and his men, and everything since had only twisted the knife.

"I thought I was trying," said Thorfinn, and laid down one hand, carefully. The other was worse. Her waiting-woman, who had survived the storm, had already brought fresh water.

"Between November and March? Any other month of the year and you are at sea. A kingdom is built on land."

"Ah, but I have you to build my kingdom for me," said Thorfinn. "It has not escaped my notice that every cottar from Stroma to Dunnotar has built a weaving shed and half their wives are making cheese. We'll pave the new roads with the rounds of it, so that every tweed bolt reaches market, once I have persuaded my swordsmen that the future lies in sheep."

His wife said nothing.

"This is going to hurt," said Thorfinn. Then he said, "I am not laughing. When I said Moray was yours, I meant it. You are building something which will last."

"I think that was a compliment," said his wife. "Are you feverish? Should I call for a priest? Or shall we both consider the circumstances exceptional and never mention it again?"

He had never known fear like it, when he had thought she might be lost to the sea. There was no fear in battle - in the waiting for it, perhaps, when one wondered if every plan would spool out as it should, or in the aftermath, when one searched for the living and the dead - but not the black anger of that moment when he recognised what Duncan had done, and the depth of his own rage. He could not afford such weakness.

The waiting-woman had warmed the bandages. He took them, and bound his wife's hands, padding her palms with lamb's wool, the bandages deliberately loose. "Change these every day. Don't use your hands," he said. "Give the blisters time to heal. A week. Less, if you're careful." She would not be careful.

He sat back on his heels. The waiting-woman had wrapped her in furs, and brushed out her hair, so that it lay like silk over the bear-skin, and the lamp-light gleamed on her bare shoulders and lit her eyes and turned them to stars. He would suspect Thorkel of engineering the entire situation, were it not that even Thorkel could not direct the tides.

"There is clothing in the kist," he said. "And you are welcome in the hall. Here in Orphir, though, we live simply. There is one bed, and you are in it. I would lend you a knife, but for the next week at least, a sword between us may suffice."

The waiting-woman gasped, but his wife smiled, sharp as steel. "So it's true," she said, "You are incapable outside the breeding season."

He felt fecund as a young ram in the scent of her body. "Only on Thursdays," he said. "In May. Are not two sons sufficient?"

"Your name will be written in every history," said his wife. "Mine will be known only to my children."

"A Viking needs his own name," said Thorfinn, "Nothing more."

Groa said, straight-backed and fierce as an eagle, "I am Ingibjorg, daughter of Bergljot. I was born Arnmødling. Before Christ, I am Margaret, but facing down the Orkney sea before your Norse gods, I am Groa, who stands between altar and hammer. I would have my name known."

Thorfinn stood. "Learn to write," he said.

"I have," said Groa.


	3. Chapter 3

Were it not for the weather, which was damp and dark, and the company, which was difficult in many different ways, and the loss of the two garnet brooches her mother had given her and three good woolen dresses which were as much advertisement as clothing, things could have been worse. Her waiting-woman Sinna had weathered boat, storm, and rescue, her children were safe, and it was immensely satisfying to hone the sharp edges of her tongue on her husband's armour. There was abundance of roast pork, Yule ale, and strong Rhenish wine at Orphir, and Arnór Jalaskald had put his harp on his knee and set it singing.

 _Strong was the tide | And sharp the rocks_  
_The hungry cliffs | Sea-torn_  
_Orkney's maelstrom | clasped the ship close_  
_Helpless, King Duncan cried out for aid_  
_And was answered | Orkney's noble wife_  
_Laid hand to oar | kept prow to wave_  
_Held hard to hope | Until rescue came_  
_Sea-Earl!_ Grágás _surfed the waves_  
_Heugh! The oarsmen cry_  
_Ha! The grapples fly..._

Duncan was scarlet with ire, although it had taken a moment for the meaning to seep through, for Thorfinn had been generous with the wine. Groa managed not to smile, and carefully adjusted her new silk tunic, thus avoiding her husband's eyes. It was a good beginning, she thought, although if she did nothing else this Yule Arnór would learn her name, because even a bad poem was better than no poem at all. The new silks could have been acquired with her colouring in mind, and gratifyingly, Duncan, who had endangered both of them with his ill-judged venture into open sea, had been forced to make do with a motley assortment of spare clothing which did his pink complexion no favours. He was still as shiny as a ripe apple, the King of Alba, although less round than he had been four years ago when Groa's first husband Gillacomghain had paid his mormaer's tribute to the old king, Duncan's grandfather Malcolm.

Malcolm had been Thorfinn's grandfather, too, although familial bonds had not warmed the relationship between Alban kings and Orcadian earl.

"He has never forgiven me," said Thorfinn, leaning close, "For taking an axe to his sledge, when we were boys."

"So resolve the issue like men," said Groa. Further down the table, Duncan stood, shouting, although she could not hear him over the sound of a chorus bellowed by a hundred cheerful sailors. _Heugh! The oarsmen cry!_ In continuing and lengthy verse, Thorfinn appeared, yet again, as the hero, although she supposed this was the customary consequence of housing one's own bard.

"I would have done," said her husband, the hero. "But all of his brothers-in-law are waiting with baited breath to step into his shoes, and one Duncan is easier to contain than four Northumbrians and their sister-brides. Just think, you could be a niece of Ealdred, too, if you married him."

Duncan had lost his wife, a fifth niece, in spring. In summer, he had brought himself and three hundred men to Moray, eating his way through Groa's halls and store-houses, collecting tribute. Groa had smiled, painfully, and made very sure never to be alone with her husband's brother. Who was standing on the bench, now. Thorkel Fóstri had a good grip on his mottled trews, and the wiry little Hirta man, Aegir, had stolen all the knives. The king of Alba was perilously close to a platter of clootie dumpling, and if he was sober, might have thought twice, because the cook Dubh Mhair was stalking his every move and observation suggested she carried the sharpest blades in the hall at her waist.

"I believe one husband at a time might suffice," Groa said. "Although sometimes my memory fails me. What does my husband look like, again?"

Thorfinn met her eyes. "Like your second son," he said, which was true.

"Heugh!" finished Arnór, and laid down his harp.

Men cheered. Duncan stood on the table. "...have someone's head for this!" he shouted.

"Your highness, you are not yourself," said Thorkel, with considerable forbearance.

"I am your king!" shouted Duncan. "I am-"

Aðvinr hit him over the head with a spare oar. Duncan, falling, smashed into the trestle table, and upended two benches. Every flagon, trencher, and taper went flying, and the dogs raced for the scraps. The reeds, freshly-spread and sweet with dried hay, seethed with paws and tails. The dumpling was as flat as an oatcake. There was an arc of good red Rhenish wine across an embroidered hanging that must have come from a Normandy nunnery, and someone's tunic was on fire.

Groa raised her eyebrows. Her husband offered more wine, and said, expressionless, "Sometimes we do this with swords." Then the great door slammed open, letting in a gust of snow and sleet, and standing in the whirlwind was the lissome, golden-headed, grinning Earl Ragnvald.

"Oh, uncle," said the lissome, golden-headed Earl Ragnvald, who had brought with him, Groa could not help noticing, his sword. "You should have let me know we had guests."

Sometime after they rolled Duncan under the table, but before they started to bet on who could travel from threshold to fireplace without touching the floor, Groa went to bed. She had been sleeping in her husband's linen tunic, which was surprisingly comfortable, if somewhat shorter than her own sleeping-shift, and Sinna was there to comb out her hair and bind it up for the night. The only difference between her husband's bed and her own was the cold steel of her husband's sword, and her husband himself, who came to bed considerably later and rather wetter, having, she thought, dunked his head into a barrel of water before retiring.

After a few minutes, silently, he began to do what came naturally to a man in his late twenties. Against her own stirring curiosity, she rolled over. The mattress stilled.

"Oh, please do," said Groa. "It's always good to know the competition."

She could feel the weight of her husband's black brows and heavy gaze in the dark, every rush light snuffed. Eventually, he said, "You are incomparable."

Which was, she supposed, gratifying, although not in the way she had hoped.


	4. Chapter 4

"A swan!" cried Duncan, eager and flushed. "It's a swan!"

"No," said Eric, who came from Eynhallow, and was thus as cunning as any finman.

"Snow," said Arnór.

"No," said Eric.

"Ice," said Groa.

"Yes!" said Eric. "Two to the Lady of Moray. What magic do you have, my lady, to ken so well?"

Groa laughed. "Have you never spent an evening by the women's fires?" she said. "What do you think we do, twiddle our thumbs and spin in silence? Now, listen: out of the eater came something to eat, out of the strong came something sweet. What am I?" There was no Christian priest at Orphir, this Yule, to know the quote.

"A seal's heart," said Aðvinr, doubtfully.

"That's impossible," said Duncan.

"Merely, clever," said Ragnvald, and saluted her.

He was a dangerous man, Ragnvald, and he could be her enemy as swiftly as he was her friend, but they had a certain understanding rooted in a rivalry she was trying to disregard.

"No," she said. "Do I win?" She looked across the table, scanning her audience, and came at last to her husband, just returned from the shore and crouched like a crane-fly in the looming fastness of his lord's seat, all elbows and nose.

Thorfinn showed his teeth. "A bee-hive in a lion skin," he said.

"No!" cried Duncan, and hit the flat of his hand off the table in frustration.

"To be fair," said Thorfinn, "I had heard it before. There is a moral to the original story, for the riddle was told by the man who killed the lion to his enemies, and they won the answer from his wife, so that he was betrayed. In consequence, he put her aside, and married her sister."

"That is the story told by a man," said Groa. "For his enemies threatened his wife and her children with fire. Should she watch them burn? A woman has more sense."

"And _that_ is the story told by a woman!" said Ragnvald, brightly triumphant.

They laughed. Ragnvald was laughing, and he could make a statue crack a smile. Even Thorfinn's cheeks rounded, and his mouth curled up at the edges. Groa almost stopped laughing herself to stare.

"Perhaps," said Duncan, who was merry still, "The moral is, never marry a woman with sisters, for you think you have one wife and end up with five, although four of them will not share your bed."

"In truth, better two than four," said Ragnvald, "And better none than one, although needs must for the getting of sons." He was smiling still. Arnór had flushed.

"Ah, no," said Groa. "The moral is, learn to write. Tell your own story."

"That's what a poet is for," said Ragnvald, and batted his eyelashes at Arnór. "If the deeds are great enough, the poem will follow. I keep waving my sword around, but so far, only a couplet, never a coupling..."

Eric was snickering into his sleeve, Duncan was staring from Ragnvald to Thorfinn, lost as a lamb, and Groa had to drop her head into her hands. Beside her, she could feel Thorfinn's deep amusement, as she had been aware of the weight of his eyes throughout the last week. They had been storm-bound for six days, the fields scoured by snow and hail that drifted into every sheltered spot. The storm-tide beat on the beaches, the sky was laden with ice, and inside the hall Thorfinn's men and his guests gambled and ate and told riddles: twisted ropes, stitched sails, and listed to sagas. With a hundred mouths to feed, chores were shared, beer broached by the barrel, and Sinna mended so many stockings men were paying her with silver.

Groa, with increasing familiarity, had found her own place at the table, where Ragnvald expected nothing less than equal terms in combat and Thorfinn laid down challenge after challenge, so that her wits were sharpened and mastered and triumphant in turn. It was a heady experience, to find and hold her own place in the politics of Scotia, and time after time she found Thorfinn at her side.

He was a clever man, her husband. Not just the Viking berserker she thought she had married. Although, he was that too.

On this, the sixth day, the skies were a lighter shade of grey, the wind only strong enough to lift the peats from the roof rather than blow them all out to sea, and for the longship men their first thought was for the ships. At first light, they were on the shore, and from that point on men hurried backwards and forwards with tools and sail-cloth and seasoned timber. The ships were battered, but, she gathered, sea-worthy, which was as much testament to the sheltered bays where they were beached as the skill of their builders. Even Thorfinn's mighty _Grágás_ was largely unharmed, although that did not stop her crew fussing over her like worker-bees grooming their queen, which was not a description Groa would ever say aloud. It was only as the light started to fail that the men had left the ships and trailed back into the hall, and some were still working as night fell.

In the dusk, just as they were lighting the tapers, Thorkel Fóstri arrived at the table with his weather-beaten face half-rueful and half-amused. "Your raven has wings," he said.

Thorfinn looked up. To Groa, he looked faintly quizzical, but with a sharp twist of resentment she realised Thorkel read deeper. He snorted. "No harm done," he said. "But your banner is wrapped about the roof-horns, and I cannot find a man to bring her down, lest there be further damage."

"Half the hird were up there when we laid down the storm nets," said Thorfinn. He was already standing. "Do I ask how my banner attained these towering heights?"

"Better not to enquire," said Thorkel. "Although there a couple of men I shall be taking back to Skaill with me, when the winds drop."

"When the winds drop," said Ragnvald.

"And who was it who would not set sail on Frigg's Day?" said Thorfinn. "Come, nephew, repay my hospitality. Retrieve my banner."

"And how do I know it is not as Earl Sigurðr's, and will thus strike me dead if I raise it?" said Ragnvald, not standing. "'Victory to the man it is carried before, but death to the man who carries it.'"

"It is not as Earl Sigurðr's," said Thorfinn. "Nor shall I battle over my rooftop on this day. Stay as you please."

"No!" said Ragnvald, standing. "Wait. Surely if the gods are kind enough to gift us with a trophy, we can make more of the winning of it? I propose," said Ragnvald, blue eyes glinting, "A wager."

Thorfinn sent the torch-bearers out first, so that the hall was rimmed in flame, and the route from beach to hall was a flickering avenue. Smoke veiled the moon in fitful shrouds, although the wind had died down to a murmur, so that the sparks danced over the short, sandy turf. There were men with brooms, and buckets of sea-water, alongside the men with tapers and horns and drums.

The hall at Orphir was low, and roofed, like every other house on Orkney, with peats, so that to climb up onto its hipped slope took no more time than to ship an oar. Thorfinn's banner, wrapped around the horns of the gabled ends, was almost within reach for a person standing on another's shoulders - if that person were allowed to touch the peat of the roof. The game was to snatch the banner, without setting foot on the turves.

A hundred men and Dubh Mhair and her Irish slave-girls were watching.

There were few other rules and those agreed between them. They had all given their belt-knives into Thorkel's keeping and were under oath not to bear steel: Groa's keys, and her tweezers and shears, were hanging on Thorkel's belt. Any found item that could be pressed into use was legal: any found person pressed into service was not. The winner was the person who, without touching the roof, first set both feet on solid ground, holding the banner aloft - and the winner was responsible for providing the losers, by Yule next, with a barrel of mead apiece. In consequence, there would have been four of them, except that Thorfinn swore to cover Arnór's debt if need be, and then there were five.

One of them was an Arnmødling. Like her cousins, Groa had run wild across the hills of her homeland, and here in the islands and hill-country of her married life she travelled daily, and fast. Her summers were not spent at sea, but neither was she confined to weaving-shed and still-room. And Groa was a cunning woman. On the beach, waiting for Thorkel to sound the horn, she kilted up the silk tunic, knotted Thorfinn's woolen cloak, and tightened the laces on her own leather boots. Her hands were healed enough for that, at least.

The moon, momentarily, shone clear, and the horn called. Duncan ran, stumbling in the sand of the beach; Arnór took two steps and fell over, because Ragnvald had swiped his feet from under him with a piece of planking, and Groa took herself steadily over the dune in Duncan's footprints. The men were cheering Duncan on in front of her, and behind her Arnór was cursing Ragnvald's forbears in aggressively florid detail, which meant that Ragnvald himself was laughing so hard he had failed to take advantage.

Groa, who had a plan, walked over the sand and jogged across the turf, looking neither left nor right at the cheering torchbearers. She could see the long, low line of the roof, red-lit, and the heavy, broad expansive of the peat roof, so low to the ground that men could leap up onto the slope of it, and the thin angled horns at each gable-end where the heather nets and their stone wind-weights were secured. The hall at Orphir, unlike many of the smaller huts on the islands, had a stone chimney, built to draw smoke out of the main hall, and its bulk divided the roof-line. The chimney was square-built, the size of a hill bothy, and Groa knew it well, for Thorfinn's bedroom drew its warmth from the back of it, the stones storing heat throughout the night.

To the side of the hall the stream that ran down to the bay had been dammed, so the women could draw clean water from a reservoir only a few steps from the cooking fire. There were always buckets in place, for Dubh Mhair was meticulous about her weapons. Groa, the line of torch-bearers bending before her, filled two. When she turned back to the hall, weighed down, she saw Thorfinn, silhouetted against the flames. He looked like the priest-beetle, all angled legs and black carapace. Thorfinn was carrying a canoe on his back, the long, lightweight canoe, built for winter hunting trips and ice portage, light enough for a strong man to carry. That strong man was insulting, with amused rancor and pitch-perfect insult, every man who had not sufficient manhood to carry their own canoe.

Should Thorfinn ever reach the hall, the canoe would be a ladder of struts and benches, if it was tilted up against the hall. A man climbing it, a man with long, powerful limbs and tensile fingers, might be able to retrieve his own war-banner from his own roof, if he were not further hindered.

It was a cabbage that first splattered off the stretched hide of the canoe's hull, and then an apple, bouncing off Thorfinn's knuckles. "Way!" Ragnvald called out, as if there were any natural hazard, but he was laughing, and the next volley of apples went part-way astray. He must have caught a torch-bearer, for the apple was returned with force, and then Ragnvald was yelping and dancing in a hail of potatoes, until Arnór shielded both of them with the wooden shields the hird used for training, and sent his own well-aimed volleys at his patron. Thorfinn, assailed, made a shield-wall of his canoe and pushed forward under it: Duncan, belatedly, added his own good throwing arm to the attack, and with two defenders Ragnvald took the opportunity to slide into the darkness and free the pigs....

Groa, almost un-noticed, ducked into the hall. The chimney and the hearth-fire in it was at the far end, and beside it a stack of cut peat. Thorfinn, well-resourced, had been burning logs for his guests, but most islanders used the slow-burning, rich scented turves. They were, Groa had noticed, dry. With care, she tipped her first bucket of water over them, and then the second, prodded them, and distrusted the degree of dampness. She picked up her buckets, and nearly stumbled over one of the slave-girls, bright-eyed and curious. The girl looked at the stack, and at the chimney, and cocked her head on one side.

She was right, but Groa's plan took time. Outside, the torch-bearers were shouting, the chant of it falling into rhythm with the beat of the drums, and then bursting out again. Groa ducked from the doorway to find that Duncan had found the store-barrels and was stacking them two lines high at the gable-end of the house, stripped to the waist, muscles bunching, and skin disconcertingly almost the same pink as the two sows rooting out apples at his feet. Duncan had failed to account for the angle of the roof, but possession of a plank might provide a route forward if he could build high enough, and fast enough.

Arnór was shouting, arms raised: from the far side of the hall, an expertly thrown rope uncurled in an arc that carried it over the ridge-line and down into his waiting hands. He pulled it tight, and fastened it off to a stake in the ground, as if he were a tight-rope walker at a fair readying his act. As Groa picked up her second load of buckets, Ragnvald appeared around the corner of the hall, waving a pair of skis. And at one gable end, her husband had set the canoe on one end, tilted it precariously against the stonework, and was perched on the central thwart, declaiming, with mime and startlingly embellished, the tale of the good goat Heiðrún who stood on her hind legs on the roof of the hall at Valhalla, eating the buds of the tree Léraðr, and who from her teats every day dispensed a cauldron full of clear mead. Heckling, his audience had strong opinions on the clarity, sweetness and strength of a perfect mead: Thorfinn, with the gravity of an elder, took his seat on the upturned central thwart, and convened a _thing_ on the spot, apparently unconscious of the slow buckling of the frame of the canoe and his own subsequent declination. Torchlight picked out the strong bones of his face, and his mobile hands, and the fierce lines of his eyebrows. Thorfinn would never be a handsome man. He did not need to be.

Groa shivered, and took her own buckets back into the hall and tipped them once again over the top layers of turves. This time, the peat seemed sodden, wet and clinging to her touch. She took the first, and laid it over the hearth-fire. The peat would not put the hearth-fire out, but it would smoother it, suppressing flames and smoke. Already the air above the logs was clearing. Groa, steadily, laid the wet turves end-to-end. When she was done, the small howe of the fireplace steamed gently, and the chimney was clear. She rattled a broom in the hollow of it, dodging falls of soot, until it was as clear as possible. Then, she wrapped Thorfinn's cloak tightly over his silks, knotted a blanket about her waist, and began to climb.

The stone insulated her from the shouts outside, so that she could hear the roar of the crowd, but not the words of it. It was warm, and soot-dry, and so comfortably stepped that a child could have found footing on the walls of it. The smell of smoke was rich with the iron-dark turves and the sharp, bitter bite of the ash logs under them, and strong enough catch in Groa's throat. That was inevitable, and the veiling black, soft falls of soot, and the narrowing of the chimney shaft. She braced her elbows and knees in bruising angles and kept her head down, looking at the banked hearth under her and not the night sky above. It was further than she thought, and harder, but she was Groa of Moray, and she would not yield. 

The neck of the chimney was, just, broad enough for a slim woman to wriggle through, if she was prepared to discard dignity. She was. Although, in the moments before the torchlight caught her, she was vain enough to take the dampened rag from her sleeve and wipe her face, and be glad she had covered her hair with the blanket. Then, she sat on the chimney edge with her feet dangling, and assessed her winnings.

There was nothing above her but sky, speckled with stars. On either side, the broad bank of the roof sloped down towards thick stone walls, although the weight of it was borne on the rafters and great wooden pillars of the hall. It was steepest at the ridge, where she sat. The grass of the turves was winter short and dry, and the weighted heather nets that held it down were security against the Orkney gales. And at the end of the roof, Thorfinn's raven banner was still wrapped around the horn of the gable, gleaming white in moonlight, flushed with fire-shadow.

One of the horns called out, and was echoed by the drums. The men and torches were close around the hall now, bellowing as if they had brought a bear to bay. Groa was high above them. She could see Duncan's pile of barrels, and the planks he had levered up and discarded as too short: there were great fresh scars carved into the lower slope of the roof, and a rope lying over the ridge which tightened as she watched: a donkey brayed, protesting, but she could see the rope take the strain. When she looked down, Thorfinn was steadying Arnór by the waist: Arnór was wearing skis. Thorfinn was laughing. 

She had never even seem him smile. But here, in the flicker of torchlight, he was unmistakably laughing, cracked open with it, his face creased and bent and extraordinary and instantly familiar. Groa was, suddenly, short of breath, hollow-chested, compelled. She could not look away. This man, her heart sang to her, as if the dam had broken and all the hopes she had never allowed herself to own tumbled into her bare, crippled marriage. There was no courage in her: she could not beat back the flush in her cheeks or the shaming heat between her thighs, and when Thorfinn looked up, she was as entranced as a rabbit by a stoat. 

He stopped laughing. He let go of Arnór's waist, and stepped back, and did not look away. His eyes were dark. It seemed to Groa as if the drums stopped, although they did not, and the shouts faded, although they were calling her name. And then, bruised and aching, she was as much of herself regained as she could be, and they were calling her name. 

She untied the blanket, and laid it out on the ridge, so that she could crawl along it. The banner was three lengths ahead and she was young and limber, but Duncan was climbing up his barrels, and men were steadying for him a plank half the height again of the hall. He flushed, when he saw her, and urged them, to raise it up for him. They were Thorfinn's men, though, not his, and the plank slipped through their fingers. On the other side of the roof, though, Ragnvald had abandoned rope, donkey and poet, and had bound spiked snow-shoes to his feet with hastily-tied strappings. He had leapt to the stone wall, and, grinning, took a first step onto the roof.

The spikes held. He called out, "You or me, Moray!" 

Ragnvald gleamed gold. Groa, black hands gripping black silks, snarled at him, and crawled faster, dragging the blanket with her, bunching it between her thighs and reaching out to drag herself forward. Ragnvald slipped: Duncan's plank slid off the roofline, and he cursed all pieces of wood, and all women, too, for good measure. But the next time he aimed true, so that it lay firmly by the gable end, and all Duncan had to do was cross the bridge of it.

"Groa!" Thorfinn cried. "Groa!"

His voice was pitched for the sea. She looked down, and he threw a stick at her. Instinct made her grasp it, thin and flexible in her hands, with a cord turned around the length of it and a hook on the end of the cord.

Groa laughed. She hung onto the roof with her thighs, as she would do a hill pony, and cast, as she would have done in any loch or river between Tromso and Carlisle. Duncan had made it onto his plank, and was teetering grimly forwards, Ragnvald had cried out and broadened his stride, gouging wad of turf and grass from the roof, and Groa's fishing hook caught and held in the Raven banner. When she tugged, the cloth unwound as gently as a skein of lambs-wool, and, as if Thorfinn's gods were kind, the hook held. She flicked the line, and the banner floated over the ridge-line into her hands. 

Ragnvald howled, and charged up the roof: Duncan looked down, blanched, and broadened his stride.

Groa tucked the blanket around her thighs, and as she had often done before, although never in Alba, tobogganed down the slope of the roof. 

Thorfinn caught her, steadying and then let go. She had both feet on solid ground, and the banner in her hands: so that all could see, she let it fly, and her husband's raven spread its wings over her head.

They were calling her name. They would have carried her around the hall, except that she would not, so they carried Arnór instead, and then Ragnvald, but not Thorfinn, who had passed his banner to Thorkel for safe-keeping and still had his arm around her waist. He had lost the smile from his face, but not his eyes.

Groa smiled back. He was not so far away, when she stood like this, in his arms. She reached out to touch the curve of his cheek. Her husband was as strange and unknowable as script had once been, and she had learned to write.

Thorfinn did not look away. His grip tightened.

And then the plank fell, smashing both of them against the stones of the hall, so that Thorfinn sprained his wrists and bruised his shoulder as he held her, but she, caught on her head by the edge of the end of the plank, fell into the dark.


	5. Chapter 5

His wife's uncle Kalv Arnason, who was also Thorkel's cousin, and who had once killed a king, arrived with the dawn tide. The Arnasons would always have a spear in every camp and a word on every council: half of them were with the boy-king Magnús of Norway, and the other half in the court of Denmark's Swein Fork-beard. If there were any left, they could be found in Alba, harassing minor kings and relatives by marriage. Thorfinn, black-browed and brooding, left Kalv to Thorkel Fóstri, which was a mistake.

"He'll take Duncan back to Perth," Thorkel announced, leaning in the doorway.

An hour ago, she had stirred in the blankets, and smiled, although she was not fully awake yet. There was a black bruise on her head, and the swelling to go with it, but she did not have the lax absence of men whose wits had been stolen by force.

"Remarkable," said Thorfinn.

"They'll leave with the tide. He'll take Groa, too."

"No," said Thorfinn.

"They are beating the drums for both of them in Perth," said Thorkel. "Kalv should have gone to Canterbury. He is here now as a favour to Crinan."

Thorfinn snorted. Duncan's father, able, cunning and greedy, had fingers and ears in every court and abbey across all Northumbria and half of Alba. It would have been remarkable if the Arnasons and Crinan had not know each other.

Thorkel was silent for a moment, watching Thorfinn's face. Then he said, "You did not plan for this."

"No," Thorfinn said, and stood up. He wrapped Groa in his own blankets. The women had already washed her clean and brushed her clothing, so that the little roll of her boots and belt and the silks he had bought for her could be tucked into the curve she made against his chest, her head on his shoulder. She stirred, and settled, even when he took her out into the cold and down to the shore. Her eyelashes fluttered, black against her pale skin, startlingly contrasted to the red of her hair. 

"Orkney," Kalv acknowledged. He had not even left the ship.

"If harm come to her, there is no-where I cannot find you," said Thorfinn.

Kalv was very still. "She is my brother's daughter."

"It is only because she is that I am trusting you with her," said Thorfinn. He lifted his wife in his arms, and handed her over the gunwales. In her absence, he felt as if there was something peculiar about his face, a blank disharmony of function, as if it had frozen and he had not noticed.

In Kalv's grasp, Groa coughed, and opened her eyes. She looked at the mast, and then straight at him. She looked at him as the boat shuddered over the sandy bottom of the bay, and then took heart and purpose and leaned into the sea. Kalv's men rowed strongly, and fast.

As long as they were in sight, Groa watched him.

Then they rounded the Ness, and she was gone, and he was not the man he thought he was.

"Did you know you have been staring at the Ness for the time it takes to roof a barn?" Thorkel Fóstri said, much later. He was as nosy as a priest and twice as irritating.

"A small barn," said Thorfinn. He felt as if someone had ducked him in the ice-strewn sea off Thule, and now every blood-vessel was painfully coming back to life. He was Earl of Orkney and Caithness: Moray was his to win over. He held, by proxy, parts of Cumbria and Ireland and the Isle of Man. One day, he might be king. He was, also, married.

"It was a fine wooing," said Thorkel.

"Arnór should make a poem," said Thorfinn. It seemed suddenly, unbearably comic. "Or not," he added. He tightened his sword-belt, and ensured his arm rings were tight above his elbows, lest battle catch him unawares, staring at shadows. "If the fates are kind, she will write her own."

"You lovesick fool," said Thorkel, and cuffed him, with affection. "Idiot. Enough mooning. Duncan will raise an army in summer, and you know it: defeat him, and Northumberland and Durham are ripe for the taking. And if Magnús is crowned in Norway, he will be no friend to the Arnmødling. His reach may well come to Shetland, and Orkney, and beyond. You have a kingdom to forge."

Thorfinn said, "She should be Queen," Then he shivered, and left sooth-saying to his step-son Luloecen, whose business it was, and to the wise-women, who told stories at the winter fires but did not fight wars. The kingdom waited.

He had only to win it.


End file.
